AnarchistArtificer

This can actually be super effective in a kink context. The comic's punchline is the notion of needing a safeword when being "tortured" with compliments, but legit, for some people, this kind of scene can be as emotionally intense as ones that involve extreme degradation. Indeed, the kind of person who could be tortured with compliments may actually not find degradation to be particularly torturous at all.

This dynamic can be a useful thing to have in one's dom(me) toolbox, but like all kinky stuff, it's important to discuss boundaries, limits and safewords in advance.

Voters care what they say. Them being bots doesn't diminish the influence they have on politics

I sometimes reflect on how an evil version of me would be so successful. I'm actually rather good at a lot of the capitalism type skills, and especially in recent years, I've reflected on how those skills combined with my genuine expertise in machine learning would make me exceptionally good at making bank off of the dumbasses who have wholeheartedly drank the koolaid. I went to a university with a lot of effective altruists, and man, they're easy to scam, and I could be so much more comfortable if I just sacrificed everything I value in life.

It turns out that I'm not actually sad that I have a moral compass, but rather that people with strong values are so often forced to consider compromising on those values because they're desperate to not live in precarity. It's grim.

Something significant that has just occurred to me is that the compulsory banking internship I had to do after my first year of university as part of a scholarship might've been more useful than I had previously realised. It was a soul killing experience and I reached some extremely low periods that Summer because of it, but I'm realising that it was a useful learning experience. Prior to that, I would've been far more likely to consider selling my soul for a comfortable life, but if nothing else, that internship taught me I physically couldn't live a life like that. Good thing I learned that on a low stakes internship, rather than something more committed.

The thing that always annoys me in this toxic cycle is the insistence on applied research. I've seen people across a few different fields run into this problem.

Let's say that they do some really interesting applied research, where they build on existing basic research to come up with some really cool applications. Yay, science! But this brings them to the boundary of what we know in that area — there's no more basic research to build upon. What they need to do (and what is very clearly cued up by what they just published) is take this applies research and just do a bunch of structured "fuck around and find out" and see what happens, hopefully producing some additional basic research that they, or other researchers, can then figure out how to apply that in interesting ways.

But noooooooooo. It's like that meme comic with the dog where it has a frisbee and it says "no take, only throw". Everything you make has to be useful, or you will struggle to get funding. The area I know most about this is in protein structure stuff, and it drives me mad to see papers complaining about how many potentially druggable targets there could be in the "dark proteome" — the large array of human proteins that we don't know shit about. Countless papers lamenting how we're not researching proteins where we're most likely to find new and useful stuff, but rather we're just doing more and more research on proteins we already know a heckton about, i.e. "searching in the areas where we have the best light"^[1]. But of course people are doing that, when someone who wants to go and search in the dark are expected to produce useful results right away.

The way it's meant to work is that some people go spelunking in the dark, and they say "hey, I might have found something here", and that causes other people to head over there to shed light on the area so we can evaluate things better. We need to start somewhere!

[1]: To be clear, I'm not blaming the researchers who write these papers or editorials, because there's very little that they can do to change it. Hell, writing these papers is likely their attempt to change this unreasonable system of expectations. Unfortunately, the root problem here is how capitalism and our funding model for research leads to toxic cycles such as "publish or perish".

Excellent content, thanks for sharing. I enjoy tormenting my friend with a constant drip feed of nerdy jokes, so I'm always looking for more to add to my supply (lest they learn that I do not actually have an infinite supply of them)

I replayed Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines (2004) recently

I do enjoy being part of a nice, orderly queue. Makes me feel like I have some purpose in life. I can just slip partway into derealization as I submit my will to the queue.

I didn't notice it as a thing that we did until I went travelling in Europe and frequently found myself ambiently stressed due to the lack of queue in a situation that would benefit from one. Sometimes if enough British people congealed together in one place by coincidence, we might find ourselves forming a neat little queue.

There's so much that makes me ashamed to be British, but this is silly and fun; I like it.

I was just going through my inbox and seeing your reply reminded me of this project, and I'm blown away all over again. Like, ugh, it's so cool it's practically painful. I find it deeply and profoundly beautiful because of how elegantly you've synthesised something that contains both the natural world, and technology.

The grim world we live in means that many of us reflexively end up hating technology, because of how it is so often used to facilitate our oppression — even the devices we own don't feel like our own. I find your post to be an essential reminder that it's not actually the technology itself that we hate, but the way it's used against us (and the people who are doing it). Some might find the way that I'm raving about this floating plant pot to be silly but this feels like a legitimately powerful symbol of what technology can be; it can empower us to make cool stuff, and rather than existing in opposition to nature, we can actually use it to glorify the natural world.

Seeing people make cool stuff like this always makes me feel inspired. I aspire to be someone who is always at least a little bit ridiculous, and this is exactly the vibe I love. Like, this is an objectively absurd thing that you've made here. I can't fathom how long it must have taken to make this (and the various kinds of expertise), and even now it's done, you've basically got a pointless ornament that requires more care than before. It's fundamentally quite silly, but that's why it's so cool!

The thing that made it click for me is to realise that particles and waves don't really exist — they're just terms we use to try to understand the world. When we see weird quantum shit happening, it's not actually weird in and of itself, we're just finding that our reductionist (but often useful) models are breaking down and we can't straightforwardly say "that's a particle" or "that's a wave".

I think of it as analogous to statistical averages. If I have a group of 100 people for whom I know the average height (and other summary statistics). Thinking of them in terms of the group is like treating them as a wave. They don't have a precisely defined position (because they're a diffuse blob of people), and although I know their average height, it's clouded by uncertainty. When we do statistics on a group of people, it's almost as if the individuals cease to exist. If all you have are the summary statistics from the group, you can't know the heights of any individuals within the crowd.

I can "zoom in" and pluck a person from the crowd and measure their height, then that's sort of like wave function collapse. Now I can precisely define the position of this person, because they're just one person — if someone says "which person are you talking about?", I can point to them and say "this one here". However, I don't know anything about their surrounding context — whether they're taller or shorter than average. They're basically a particle.

The key to this is how "zooming in" on an individual person gives us a fundamentally different perspective to the zoomed out view of the crowd.

This reminds me of the surprisingly effective inflatable frog costume that was in the news recently during protests against ICE

I learned about it last week; it's delightful. A close friend is half Czech, so I often end up sharing with her cool stuff I learn about Czechia, and this was one of them.

Something that's been cool about this is that before I knew of her Czech heritage, I knew very little about Czechia. I've realised that whenever I stumbled across cool facts about the place or people, my brain didn't have anything concrete to attach it to, so it'd just end up in a nebulous blob of Eastern European-ness, and would more readily be forgotten. A lot of what I've learned over the last year or so has mostly been because if I stumble across something cool, like this dam, then my brain now goes "ooh, this is cool, I should tell my friend about this". She acts like a sort of semantic anchor in my mind, and that's really cool

I think that power will always be a problem that we need to be mindful of. Even on the small scale, power imbalances can arise and lead to harm if we don't proactively manage them. I find it useful to think of anarchism as an ongoing process rather than a goal, which means that the task will never be completed.

Regarding democracy, I've really enjoyed Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau's writings. They propose a sort of radical democracy. I think it's "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy" that I've read some of. It's pretty dense, but I found it rewarding, and it reshaped how I think about democracy. In particular, I was far more pessimistic about the possibility of democracy at all before I read it.

I think the YouTube channel Think That Through was what led me to go read Mouffe and Laclau, if you're a video enjoying person. It wasthis video on Hegemony